In the end, it doesn't even matter
by Chichuri
Summary: Logan and Veronica break up, again.


**Pairing/Character:** Logan, Logan/Veronica, Veronica  
**Rating:** R for mild language

**Spoilers:** through 3.15

**Disclaimer:** Characters not mine, of course.

**Author's Note:** As always, thanks and love to vagajammer for the (reluctant) beta. Title is from "In the End" by Linkin Park.

**In the end, it doesn't even matter**

"It's never gonna work, is it?" Veronica slides down the wall as if her legs can't hold her up and huddles in the corner, chin dropped to her collarbone, shoulders rounded and shaking, knees pulled in close, and hands locked, white knuckled, against her calves. The sphere of light cast by the single lamp illuminating the living room doesn't reach the corners, and she nearly disappears into the shadows.

"Ya think?" Logan snarls. "What gave you the first fucking clue?"

He strains to hear her response. "I always thought, somehow..."

"All the problems would magically go away and we'd fly off to never-never land, where everything was just peachy?" He should be disturbed by his vicious satisfaction at her flinch—he hasn't gotten off on her pain in years, not really—but small, bitchy blondes with chips on their shoulders and superiority complexes always bring out the worst in him, despite years of developing the self control to blunt the razor edge of his tongue and his anger.

"Thought we'd somehow figure it all out," she whispers as she curls deeper into herself.

"That for a relationship to work, you have to trust someone? We fucking figured that one out a long time ago. And _some_ of us weren't willing to try."

"I trust you."

And still, even now, they are back to the old arguments, the issues that are never quite resolved, just postponed until the next round. "No. No, you don't. You always say you do, then reality sets in, and we find out how little those words really mean." He settles next to her, close enough that he can feel her heat. Of course, he can feel that heat across a crowded room, a frisson of awareness that refuses to go away even when they're on the outs.

"I trust you more than anyone else in my life."

His hands clench, and he digs his fingers into the soft pile of the carpet. He's pissed that no matter how many times he hears the words, they twist and soften something inside him. "Which means, what? Half as far as you can throw me? Or is it less than that?"

"I know." She nods jerkily and swallows, blonde hair falling back to expose her face as she raises her head to meet his eyes. "I know I didn't... couldn't trust you enough. As much as you deserved."

"Trust _enough_?" His harsh laugh sounds more like a growl. "Fuck, Veronica, the only thing you ever _trusted_ was that I'd eventually do something not up to your exalted standards." His arms sweep in sharp, abrupt gestures. "That I'd inevitably fuck up, and that whatever we'd managed to build between us would go to shit."

"I trust that you'll always be there for me, if I really need you."

He doesn't miss that she still uses present tense. "Find someone else to play the part of your dependable lackey. I'm done."

She nods again and drops her forehead to her knees, breath hitching as she sucks in air to steady the sobs. "Yeah. Yeah, I got that."

He can count on one hand the number of times her walls have crumbled and he's seen her cry. Lilly's death. The first time he had cut loose and let her know how far she had fallen from grace after Lilly's death. A glimpse as the elevator doors closed, that surreal morning after Alterna-Prom. The night of graduation, when grief for the father she believed dead nearly consumed her. Now. Of those, two involved mourning the deaths of people she loved. The other three were on him, and each time he's ached to pull her into his arms and comfort her.

"There's too much between us," he says, suddenly desperate to make her understand. "All we ever do is hurt each other, Veronica. Time after time, we think we can make things better, and it backfires in a fucking explosion that leaves both of us scorched and bleeding. Each time it gets a little more painful, a little harder to put ourselves back together. There's nothing worth all this pain."

"Once, you thought it was worth writing songs about," she murmurs.

He hears the echoes of a conversation he still regrets he can't quite remember. "Maybe I grew up."

She rubs at her eyes with the back of one hand. "I love you."

A flash of fury at the glaring reminder of yet another reason they've come to this burns away desperation and regret. "Oh, so now, you blithely say the words. Another tool in your arsenal? Hoping that maybe it'll have some effect?" He bangs his head against the wall, welcoming the physical pain to distract him from the emotional, both his and hers. "Fuck. And fuck you, for that."

"I know it doesn't matter, anymore. It's over. Finished. But it's true, and you deserve to know, and I should have told you, should have been telling you, for years."

It shouldn't break him to hear her so broken, not after everything. He's glad the anger still simmering through him overpowers the need to ease her pain. "Really," he says, pouring every bit of doubtful irony he can muster into that single word. "Then why have you never freely offered up those three little words, if you 'should have been' all these years? Why dangle them in front of me _now_, of all times?"

She looks up, eyes red-rimmed and tears freely falling, defiantly meeting his glare but still protectively hunched into herself. "Because it's the end, and there's nothing you can do to hurt me with it anymore, no way you can make me hurt more than I already do. Because you've already joined the ranks of everyone I love leaving, so the worst has already happened, and I have nothing left to be scared about. Because after everything you put up with, you should at least be able to take away that, no matter what you might think about me, you really did break my heart." She pauses to take a deep breath. "Because after tonight, I'll never have another chance." She closes her eyes. "Because I'll never get another chance."

"No," he says, and the hoarseness of his voice matches hers. "You won't." Despite her claims, hundreds of ways he could twist those words and use them against her parade through his brain. He considers and discards each. He's not going to go there. Not now. Not in the last few minutes they have together. He doesn't want his last memories of her to be of how efficiently he can strip down her guards and savage her. He has enough of those memories already, entwined with the memories of her doing the same to him.

"So I might as well say all the things I always stopped myself from saying," she continues. "The stuff I could barely admit to myself. I've got nothing left to lose, no expectations, no illusions."

"What makes you think I want to hear it?" It's a half-hearted swipe, not really trying to hurt her, but it does. He can see it in her eyes, in the way they dip briefly before raising to meet his squarely once again.

Her lips curve in a bitter twist. "As you have—and often—pointed out, it's all about me. I'm saying what I need to say. I can't make you listen." She looks away, eyes distant. "I can't make you do anything you don't want to. From day one, I've never been able to."

"That was _your_ problem. You always wanted to fucking remake me, force me to be someone I wasn't." The bitterness still seethes within him, a resentful film that overlays his desperate wish for unconditional acceptance and love. He tugs his sleeves over his hands and forces his voice to remain steady. "For you I was always the fucking _disappointment_, just like I'd been for my father. Fuck, just like I'd been for _Lilly_, whenever she got fucking tired of dealing with me."

She glances back to him briefly, then away. "I was never disappointed," she says softly. "I just wanted you to live up to all the potential I could see in you. Be the person I knew was there, but you always hid. Is it wrong to want something _more_ for someone?"

If only it were true. "It's wrong when you refuse to accept who they are. I accepted who _you_ were."

She shakes her head, biting her lower lip. "You never did."

"Fuck that, Veronica," he laughs in disbelief. "I _loved_ you for who you were!" The niggling voice in the back of his brain whispers '_loves_'. His love for her isn't safely in the past; it still chafes against his heart, a constant irritation occasionally flaring into agony only time and distance will ease.

Veronica turns to him with a small, pained smile. "You may have loved me for it, but you didn't accept it." She just raises an eyebrow at his immediate, angry, denial. "I saw it Logan," she says over his protests, and he subsides into irritated silence. "Every time I talked about my cases, I could see you wanted to make me _stop_. You kept trying to swaddle me in protection, to keep me from doing what I had to do to exorcise my ghosts. Then you abandoned me when I needed you the most, when I was trying the hardest to keep my head above water and deal with the memories, the pain, and the guilt."

"I _never_ abandoned you," he snaps, eyes narrowing.

"You abandoned me and turned on me when Lilly died, and you then you abandoned me 'cause you couldn't deal during the rape case."

Even when the ostensible subject is something else, it always comes back to Lilly and the year after she died. The dynamics of their relationship were set in those terrible months of anger and pain and perceived betrayal, and when she gets emotional she starts reverting to those instinctive patterns. He's supposed to be the bad guy, so she always twists reality until he's the one in the wrong. "I _broke up_ with you because you wouldn't let me in. You didn't need anyone—"

"I needed _you_." She spins to face him head on and rises to her knees, putting her eyes level with his. "I needed you there to ground me, to remind me how to move on with my life. To remind me that there were things worth living for, and that maybe I could eventually sleep through the night without dreams of fire and violation. To remind me that there was something, _something_, that was worth clawing through the pain of trust. And you left." Her voice breaks on the final word. "You _left_, just like everybody else. You left, and I had to pull myself back together."

She doesn't get to win, not this time. He's right and he knows it, and he'll be damned if he lets her turn it back onto him. "And then you came back, and then _you_ broke up with _me_. Then we got back together, and now, finally, we're breaking up _again_. Lather, rinse, and repeat, the cycle goes on and fucking on, Little Miss Martyr. If you could climb down from your high horse for two _fucking_ seconds, you could _maybe_ see this goes both ways. But no, that's too much to ask, for you to consider the rest of us mere mortals in your twisted little schemes."

"Not consider..." She gapes at him, blinking rapidly.

"Like this is news to you? I ask you for one thing—"

"You gave me an ultimatum!"

"I _said_ if you really wanted this relationship to work, like you kept claiming, _ad nauseum_, you should try out that little writer's advice of 'show, don't tell'. You recognize it, right? You always did do so well in English."

"I told you I had to—"

"I asked you to be there _one night_. It was important to me, and you couldn't even do that." She never bothered to offer any justification, just that he had no right to the details, she was never going to talk about it, and the whole thing needed to be dropped immediately. Oblivious as always, she'd apparently expected him to roll over and unquestioningly take her crap. She never believed that he'd meant it when he said if she couldn't bend this much he was _done_.

"I had to, for Liz—my client. It was the one night the Mann—" She closes her eyes, teeth clenched against letting any further words escape. It's a testament to how rattled she is that she spoke any vestiges of client names; she is rabid about her newfound and supremely ironic attachment to client privacy.

"For once in your life, back away and let it go." Her belated justifications don't matter, not really. They'd been falling apart for weeks—months, even. Veronica's nonappearance had just been the final crack to shatter their volatile relationship. He won't let himself be cut to the bone trying to reassemble the jagged pieces. He refuses to bleed for her anymore.

"But—"

"Let it die, Veronica," he says, almost gently. "There's nothing left to be saved."

Her eyes dart over his face. He steels himself, not letting inconvenient remnants of affection taint his resolve. Whatever she's searching for, she doesn't find it. Or maybe she does. The pain in her eyes is almost unbearable.

"You're right." She pushes to her feet, wavering for a moment as she finds her balance, then stands ramrod-straight. "It's over and done." He watches the layers of her unfeeling mask crawl over her tears and snick into place, and all emotions dim and drain away to nothing.

It's not just the pain that fades, but everything. Before, even when she was at her most bitchy and unreasonable, he could see the forces that drove her. Love, hate, fear, wonder, amusement, regret, resolve, passion, _life_: it has all been there to the one who knew how to slide behind the seemingly impenetrable walls. Now, that spark, the glowing soul of the girl he likes, hates, and loves, is gone. There is nothing but cold emptiness behind the facade, a hollow mockery devoid of life.

He wants to reach out and touch her, to stroke her fire back into fury, just to make sure the embers are still there, somewhere, banked so low even he can't see them.

He no longer has that privilege.

The door softly clicks shut behind her, an understated exit to the last act of her perpetual game of running away from him.

This time, he doesn't get to catch her.

He sits, staring into welcoming glow from the lamp, until the sun finally rises to chase the shadows away.


End file.
